[staunch]

Pinterest is downloading images from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. No one is complaining about linking or even hotlinking.

[wanderr]

Couldn't that be considered caching? Wouldn't people be upset if they were hotlinking?

[franze]

pinboard, del.icio.us, ... (if other bookmarking sites still exist, please add here) is downloading title-text from other sites and hosting it on their own servers. what's the difference?

[staunch]

It seems reasonable to me that taking meta-data would fall under fair-use but taking the actual media wouldn't.

For example: Scraping <title> tags off Netflix would be legit, but copying Netflix video files wouldn't.

[Karunamon]

The difference being that pictures are commonly inserted inline in the web for discussion/humour/other purposes more than video. When a video is inserted in a page, more often than not it's the focus of the page.

I always thought of rehosting images as the courteous thing to do. Say someone made an image macro that you want to insert inline into a post on a board somewhere. Depending on the popularity of the forum, hotlinking it could suck up their bandwidth allotment and get their site knocked offline. The nice thing to do would be then to rehost it (using Imgur or the like) and link it that way.

[TeMPOraL]

Well, Facebook not only takes parts of text, but also displays thumbnails of actual image content of the linked site.

[tissarah]

Thumbnails and excerpts are pretty clearly fair use. Especially when you are trying to encourage the market for the copyrighted work.